I’m currently working my way through the recently-released report by the Commission on Assisted Dying – it’s a long and appropriately life-sapping document, but a number of commentators has been quicker than I to get through it. Douglas Noble, writing at the BMJ blog, isn’t impressed. Based on what I’ve read so far, I’m tempted […]
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A Little Something for the Holiday…
Here’s a little holiday challenge for you: come up with a bioethical controversy that some dark part of your soul wants to be real, if only because (a) you can get a paper out of it, and (b) it’ll cause heart attacks among the sort of people who make a point of listening to The […]
Is Bird Flu Research a Security Risk?
A story that has had a little airtime on the news over the last 24 hours or so concerns requests by US officials that details of research into a bird flu variant be held back from publication on the grounds that it might be of use to terrorists: The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recommended […]
A Conscience Clause with Claws
There’s a flurry of papers on conscientious objection in the latest JME: Giles Birchley argues, taking his cue from Arendt, that conscientious objection has a place in medicine here; Sophie Strickland’s paper on medical students’ attitude to conscientious objection (which I mentioned in July) is here; and Morten Magelssen wonders when conscientious objection should be accepted here. […]
A Philosopher Writes on her own Infertility
Over at Feminist Philosophers, there’s a great little series of posts by an anonymous female philosopher about her experience of becoming infertile. It’s well worth a read: part 1 is here; part 2 here; and part 3 here. I’m going to take the liberty of reproducing the penultimate paragraph: My partner and I are a […]
Competition!
Alex Calladine has asked me to publicise this – and I’m only too happy to oblige: SYBHEL Short Story Competition Synthetic Biology & Human Health: Myths, Fables & Synthetic Futures Calling all writers, film makers, animators and artists – do you have a story to tell about the impact synthetic biology may have on future […]
Smoking in Cars and the BMA: The Counterwheeze
You can tell libertarians from the sound they make: it’s the faint rattle of a tiny intellect untethered in an otherwise empty mind. Cheap and all-too-easy insults aside, though, I’d been wondering how long it’d be, in the wake of the BMA’s recommendation that smoking be banned from cars, before we got a response from […]
What can we Learn from “The Exorcist”?
When John Sentamu stood up in the House of Lords a couple of weeks ago and spoke about the need for the NHS to concern itself with “spiritual” needs – and illustrated his claim with an anecdote about something resembling an exorcism – the response from a lot of the blogosphere was, at its friendliest, one […]
Personhood in Mississippi
Phew, I thought, when I heard that Measure 26, the proposal to redefine “personhood” to cover the unborn, had been thrown out by the electorate of Mississippi. To catch up: the prosaically-named piece of legislation would have amend[ed] the Mississippi Constitution to define the word “person” or “persons”, as those terms are used in Article III of […]
Discovering Consciousness in the “Permanently Unconscious”: What Should We Do?
Comment on “Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study” by Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen Published in The Lancet, online Nov 10. Cruse and colleagues founds evidence of some kind of consciousness in 3 out of 16 […]